Graduation Ceremony July, 3 2009
Margo Fuchs, Dean of the Masters Program in Expressive Arts
Dear graduating students
Now, you are standing at the threshold of the past (studies) and the future (work) to come. One foot on what you learned, one foot set out into the blue.
As you stand on the threshold
your time has come
to look around, before you look ahead
to treasure the way you left behind, and
to carve the next step heartfelt.
Your time has come to let go of being fathered on the way to the diploma. From now on you become your own mother, lend her your hand and design your certificate for life, sealed by your working hands.
Your time has come to do good and better, and to keep your peaceful weapons called the arts sharp and touching.
Now, this small place here, Saas Fee became your host town and our community is witness to your completion of your studies here at EGS.
This place shall follow you as you go, as we stay.
Take with you how it feels to look up
and being faced by still formations of steep rocks -
bare rocks, with patches of snow and silver shining spots.
Take with you the ring of the church bell,
the steady streaming sound of falling waters,
the white cotton clouds, coming and dissolving
the yellow flower heads in the green grass,
the small light blue forget – me - not
the singing of the birds
the heat of the sun on your face.
Wherever you go from now on –
you are crowned
by the plenty of white, green and blue.
A white, that embraces silence.
A green, that is always an oasis
to get soft and dressed up for new hope.
A blue, as the untouchable future
that keeps us walking from here to here.
As you go, always remember
we breathe the same air
at different places
under the same sun.
With best wishes, and be blessed
Stephen K. Levine, Dean of the Doctoral Program in Expressive Arts
Today is the graduation day of sixteen students in the masters program in expressive arts at the European Graduate School. These students come from a variety of different countries: Switzerland, Germany, France, the United States and Canada. They work in a variety of fields: therapy, education, coaching, consulting and social change. But they all have in common that they have dedicated themselves to a rigorous program of learning and personal transformation over a period of several years, including most recently a stringent set of examinations conducted in front of their teachers and their peers. I believe they are ready to take what they have learned out into the world.
But what kind of world do they face? We all know that this is a period of great uncertainty. We are faced with the challenges of a world economic downturn, political and military conflict between powers great and small, and the prospect of disastrous climate change and environmental catastrophe. These challenges are bad enough in themselves, but the real problem is that the Western countries seem to have lost confidence in themselves; our old belief systems have been shattered, faith in the beneficent effects of scientific and technological progress has been lost, and many seek consolation in dogmatic affirmation of ideologies that promise security by demonizing those who disagree. Today we might say, as William Butler Yeats said almost a century ago, that, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate certainty.”
It would seem that the graduating class is about to enter an unwelcoming world. Yet I believe that the graduates who sit here before you are uniquely equipped to deal with the challenges which this world sets before them. All their training and education has been for the purpose of helping those who are themselves challenged and require assistance. In addition to learning the skills that are necessary for the work of change agents in helping others come to terms with difficulties, the graduates have had to face their own challenges, all the personal impediments that they have had to overcome to be able to do this work. They have learned to have a humble confidence in their own abilities to deal with problems and to find solutions, they have had to develop the resources necessary to become capable of helping others who are in dire straits, and they have had to draw on their creative powers to find solutions where others see only problems.
The educational program at EGS is unique in taking seriously the capacity of the arts to show us how to develop the imaginative resources we need to cope with situations of great uncertainty. John Keats, the British poet, once said that the artist needs to develop what he called “negative capability” – to be able to live with uncertainty and contradiction without irritable searching for reasons.
The artist is challenged at every moment to, as Ezra Pound enjoined us, “make it new,” to find a way through a difficulty that has never been attempted before. At EGS, we teach that obstacles are opportunities for new pathways, not insurmountable barriers to the way forward.
At the same time, we join this artistic sensibility with a concern for the other who calls to us for our aid. E.M. Forster, the British novelist, enjoined us to “only connect,” and this willingness to encounter the other person in whatever state they may be is a prerequisite for work in all the fields covered by the expressive arts. The graduating students have not only learned to develop their own creative and imaginative capacities; they have also learned to foster the resources that are necessary for working in a helping way with others, whether they be individuals, groups or communities. These resources include the ability to listen with appreciative curiosity to others, to help them clarify what is essential in the challenging situation, to aid them in finding the resources that they have used in the past in similar situations and to imagine creative solutions that were never before envisioned.
Most of all, they have learned to “step forth with courage,” in the words of our Provost, Paolo Knill, to be willing to take risks and make interventions that challenge the others to go beyond what they previously thought was the limit of their capacity. Working with others in the expressive arts requires both the humility to know that we do not have the answers to their problems and the confidence to believe that we can help them to find their own solutions by taking a creative step forward.
Now the students have finished this stage of their education. They themselves will have to step forth with courage into an uncertain world. We at EGS are confident that their education has prepared them to deal with such uncertainty and to find new paths forward that we ourselves have not foreseen. Our future is precarious, but if it is in the hands of those who are like the graduates who sit here before you, I have the confidence to believe that we will find a way.
Ellen Levine, Dean of Independent Studies in Expressive Arts and Program Director of Expressive Arts and Social Change
On the paper you have received about the format of this graduation ceremony, you will see that I am listed as the program director of the “MAPS” program. This is the acronym for the master of advanced professional studies certificate for the program in expressive arts and social change. But in many ways, it is a program about maps---not to train map-makers in the literal sense but to train people who will take the arts and apply them to promote change in situations of difficulty that occur outside of the territories traditionally associated with the work of therapy: clinics, hospitals, and private rooms. For this work, perhaps a map is necessary. It is good to have some sense of the lay of the land before you set out and while you are traveling. But maps are sometimes tricky. They don’t really always give you the feeling of the territory---its strange twists and turns, the new roads that have emerged since the map was drawn. Therefore, the students in this program are also being trained to make the map itself through their own acts---to be flexible to adapt to new situations as they arise and to meet the unknown territory with courage and confidence.
What will give students the courage to encounter and move through problems and difficulties that derive from the inequities and injustices of this world, to meet people in groups and communities who are radically different from themselves and to collaborate with them to create the maps that can be used to navigate through these territories?
One thing we know is that for us as human beings, the shapers of our world, we have the arts to nourish ourselves along the way, to help us to hold the suffering and the joy that we experience as we travel through our lives. Perhaps we could say that the arts are our maps—at least they could be the foundation of our maps. The arts enliven us. They build our resources and capacities. They can give us hope where none existed before. They can call us to act and respond. The arts provide us with new perspectives and ways of seeing. More than ever in these times, we need imagination and new visions to help us to respond to and navigate through the unknown that is coming toward us in the future.
To Rachel Levey-Baker and Silvia Suarez, who are receiving their certificates in the program in expressive arts and social change, and to Heather Barrett who is receiving a Masters in expressive arts with a concentration in social change, you are helping us to define a new field. In that sense you are helping us to draw the map of this new territory. Remember, as you travel along, to nourish yourselves through your own practice of the arts. When you lose your way, as you will from time to time, come back to the arts to help you find your way back to the road again.